North Korea, Iran, and the

Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons: The Threat, U.S.
Policy, and the Prescription
. . . and the India Deal

Robert L. Gallucci

There are similarities and connections, as well as important differences,

between the cases of North Korea and Iran.
In both cases, the prospect of these states acquiring a nuclear weapons
arsenal has regional implications. In Northeast Asia, a North Korea with
nuclear weapons threatens other states in the region, beginning with
South Korea and Japan. The DPRK has developed a medium range ballis-
tic missile (MRBM), the No Dung, which could reach Japan. The North
can be counted upon to try to design a weapon that could be mated with
its MRBM so that it could blackmail or deter Tokyo in a crisis. Since Seoul
is within range of the North’s artillery deployed along the DMZ, the
North already poses a nuclear threat to the South. The fact that the South
Korean public apparently does not see the North as a threat does not
mean that the government in Seoul is as relaxed. The first point, then, is
that Seoul and Tokyo may eventually react to a growing North Korean
nuclear weapons program with decisions to abandon their own non-
nuclear status and dependence on alliance with the United States, with-
draw from the NPT—as North Korea already has—and develop nuclear
weapons of their own. It should be recalled that the South Koreans had a
secret program in the 1970s and that both these countries have advanced
nuclear energy programs that could be converted into substantial nuclear

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weapons programs in short order, in a few years at the most. Obviously,
if either Japan or the ROK were to begin such a process, it would sharply
increase the likelihood that the other would do likewise.
Similarly, should Iran succeed in creating a nuclear weapons capabil-
ity, it is likely to prompt others in the Middle East to consider doing the
same. The Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia, would be among the
first to weigh the pros and cons of becoming a nuclear weapons state to
prevent a Persian hegemony over the Gulf. Iran has deployed an MRBM
of its own, the Shahab III, based on the North Korean No Dung, which
can reach targets as far away as Israel. Like the North Koreans, the Ira-
nians would have to design a weapon that could be delivered by their
missile, but this is thought to be the principal reason why they acquired
their MRBM in the first place since its inaccuracy makes it a poor deliv-
ery system for conventional explosives.
Second, in addition to creating regional instability and beginning the
unraveling of the NPT regime, both of these cases pose direct threats to
the interests of the United States. Once North Korea and Iran have
nuclear weapons, deployments of American forces to the region will
have to take account of their nuclear capability. While we may continue
to rely on deterrence to dissuade any nuclear use against our forces, cir-
cumstances could emerge where we will be limited in our options
because of the nuclear threat, particularly in scenarios where the regimes
of those states believe their survival is threatened and thus fail to see our
retaliation as unacceptable.
Perhaps the gravest threat these states pose to the United States does
not arise from their stockpiling of nuclear weapons, but from their accu-
mulation of fissile material. We have a long history of living with the
threat posed by potentially hostile states armed with nuclear weapons,
against which we had and have no defense, that is, the Soviet Union and
China. We dealt with that threat by the development of a robust deter-
rent capability, promising to do to any attacker what it would regard as
unacceptable damage, in the event of an attack on the United States or
its allies. Now, with the emergence of terrorist entities such as Al Qaeda,
we may not be certain who was responsible for an attack, and we can
have no confidence that the promise of retaliation would discourage one.
In this world, the key to defending our cities is preventing terrorists from
getting nuclear weapons or the material necessary to make them. Today
that means persuading Russia and Pakistan to do a lot better at securing

24  robert l. gallucci
their fissile material and nuclear weapons; tomorrow that could mean
trying to convince Iran and North Korea that we will find out if they
were to sell such material or weapons to Al Qaeda. In short, both these
countries’ fissile material production programs pose a deadly threat to
American cities that we have no sure way of meeting.

CAPABILITIES
There are also differences in the capabilities of these countries and the
circumstances of the policy situation. North Korea had a small pluto-
nium producing reactor and reprocessing facility which it used to pro-
duce and separate plutonium in the early 1990s. These facilities were
effectively frozen for about ten years following the negotiation of the
Agreed Framework in 1994. However, after the collapse of the Frame-
work in the first Bush Administration, the North restarted plutonium
production in its reactor at approximately a bomb’s worth per year, and
claims to have separated the plutonium that had been sealed during the
period of the Agreed Framework.
Most estimates would credit North Korea with now having approx-
imately forty kilograms of plutonium, enough for perhaps eight nuclear
weapons. In addition, our intelligence community detected significant
numbers of components for a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment pro-
gram being transferred from Pakistan to the DPRK during the late nine-
teen nineties through the early part of this decade. We do not know
where this equipment is, or if it has been assembled into a cascade of
machines, or if it is in operation. Estimates about when the North might
also be producing highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons are
therefore highly speculative, but prudence would have us expect the
North Koreans to eventually master the technology and develop another
source of fissile material.
Iran, by contrast, has little in the way of operating nuclear facilities,
but substantially more potential for fissile material production than
North Korea over time. Iran has one power reactor very nearly com-
pleted by the Russians located at Bushehr. This is a light water reactor,
easy to safeguard, whose spent fuel is difficult to reprocess for weapons,
and possibly subject to other provisions negotiated by Moscow that
make it relatively “proliferation resistant.” The concern over Iran stems
from two programs: a gas centrifuge program that now includes only

North Korea, Iran, and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons  25

164 operating machines but which is planned to grow to one of thou-
sands of machines, about which international attention is now focused;
and a plutonium production program centered on a heavy water moder-
ated “research” reactor, now in the design phase following Russian assis-
tance, and which has received little notice. Iran may be as far away from
accumulating fissile material as five to ten years, if their capacity is lim-
ited to what we are now aware of, or it could be much closer, if it has
constructed and even begun operating a secret centrifuge cascade.

POLICY
Administration policy to deal with the threat posed by both these coun-
tries has suffered from the same handicap: unwillingness at the top of the
Bush administration to embrace negotiation as a legitimate and poten-
tially effective way of addressing such threats from “rogue regimes.” In
the case of North Korea, the president let it be known during his first
couple of months in office that he doubted the utility of the kind of nego-
tiation with the DPRK that had been pursued by the Clinton administra-
tion, much to the dismay of the government in Seoul which had invested
heavily, financially and politically, in the so called sunshine policy of
openness with the North. While nothing much happened during the first
year of the Bush administration in Washington’s relations with
Pyongyang or Tehran, America suffered the attacks of September 11,
which had an important psychological impact on the administration.
The first State of the Union Address by the President in January 2002
laid out his approach to North Korea and Iran by lumping them with
Iraq and describing them collectively as an axis of evil, which threatened
international security by their association with terrorist allies. Months
later, the President’s commencement speech at the U.S. Military Acad-
emy at West Point foreshadowed the national security strategy, formally
enunciated in the fall of 2002, which described a policy of pre-emption
as appropriate to threats to the national security of the kind posed by
these rogue regimes.
Against this backdrop, the Bush administration took the position
that it would not talk with the North Koreans outside of the “six party
context,” that is, a meeting of China, Russia, Japan, South Korea,
North Korea and the United States. Furthermore, it would not negoti-
ate with the North until it committed to give up its secret uranium
enrichment program and allow inspections to verify its compliance with

26  robert l. gallucci
its obligations under the NPT and the Agreed Framework. While the
North Koreans initially refused to meet in the six-party context, they
eventually agreed and a number of meetings among the parties took
place, beginning in 2003 and ending in September, 2005. At the last
meeting, there was agreement in principal on the rough outlines of a
new framework, but there have been no meetings since then. What lit-
tle progress was made has effectively been stalled, the North Koreans
complaining that an American action to sanction a bank in China for
dealing in North Korean counterfeit currency amounts to sanctions on
the North, a situation it says must end before the DPRK will return to
the table. Thus, the current situation has North Korea continuing to
produce plutonium, and probably expanding its nuclear weapons arse-
nal, even as it works to construct a gas centrifuge facility that will yield
still more fissile material.
The administration, having no faith in or enthusiasm for negotia-
tions with Pyongyang, and no military option absent knowledge of the
location of weapons, material or enrichment facility, is left without a
policy for North Korea. In the meantime, the South Koreans continue to
do business with the North, decreasing the incentive in the North to
reach an agreement with the United States.
The situation with Iran has some of the same elements that are pres-
ent in the North Korean case. The administration’s unwillingness to
engage Tehran has meant that negotiations with Iran over the years
about ending its uranium enrichment program have been left to the
Europeans—Britain, France and Germany—the Russians, and the IAEA.
The United States has always favored bringing the matter to the UN
Security Council, even though it was far from clear that the Council
would be able to act given the veto power of both Russia and China. The
basis for such a move was the discovery that Iran had secret nuclear
facilities that it failed to submit to the IAEA for inspection. When Iran
refused to terminate its enrichment program, the IAEA board ultimately
did report the matter to the UN Security Council, where it now rests.
Neither the Russians nor the Chinese appear willing to support any
sanctions resolution that could lead to the use of force. With the United
States still publicly declaring its disinterest in any direct discussions with
Iran, and Iran continuing to construct the necessary facilities for a large
centrifuge program, our policy is stalemated here as well.

North Korea, Iran, and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons  27

PRESCRIPTION
The policy prescription in both cases, North Korea and Iran, is the same:
develop a serious negotiating position and engage both parties in direct
discussions aimed at resolving the issues. In the case of North Korea, this
would mean that we would have to be prepared to make serious conces-
sions in the interest of gaining significantly from the North. On our side,
we should be willing to give the North the bilateral negative security
guarantees it seeks, regenerate the light water reactor program that had
been initiated under the 1994 Agreed Framework and then abandoned in
2003, remove continuing sanctions against business with North Korea,
and generally normalize relations with the North. We have to be prepared
to do all this, without requiring fundamental changes in the North’s gov-
ernment or human rights policy. The near term benefits would be limited
to national and international security, while our concern for the people of
North Korea would have to be addressed over the longer term, much as
we approach other governments whose domestic policies we find repug-
nant. On their side, we would have to require of the North that it give up
its uranium enrichment activity, cease reprocessing and dismantle its gas
graphite nuclear program as had been planned under the Agreed Frame-
work, disassemble its nuclear weapons and submit accumulated pluto-
nium to safeguards before removal from the country, and return to the
NPT—and all this under an inspection regime that would have to be
more extensive than the standard IAEA provisions.
The Iranian case requires that the United States develop with the
Europeans and the Russians a robust set of incentives that are materially
significant and which address the issues of national prerogative raised by
our insistence that Iran abandon its uranium enrichment program. That
package of incentives must be coupled with a set of sanctions whose
effects would ultimately be felt by the regime, not just the people. The
key to the Iran case is Russia: with Russian cooperation on sanctions
and incentives, Tehran would have no place to turn; without Moscow
aboard, the impact of American and European action will be undercut.
At the same time, the possibility that the international community might
at some point sanction military action aimed at slowing or stopping the
Iranian nuclear program must be kept alive. Facing sanctions and suffer-
ing a possible air strike on the one hand, and enjoying a range of finan-
cial and trade inducements—including guaranteed access to uranium
enrichment services—on the other, might well persuade Tehran to agree

28  robert l. gallucci
to freeze its enrichment activity until it developed a light water reactor
economy that could plausibly justify the development of its own enrich-
ment facility. This would likely take a decade or two. Again, as with
North Korea, the key is the willingness of the United States to directly
engage Iran, rather than continuing to leave the responsibility of negoti-
ations to others as we deplore the lack of progress.

THE INDIA DEAL

Three points about the deal should be made. The first is that those who
advocate making this special arrangement to permit nuclear coopera-
tion with India ought to be clear—and honest—about why they are
doing so. The second is that the reasons for making the particular deal
they propose, while important, do not justify the cost to the national
security of doing so. And third, that there is an arrangement which
would, in fact, strike the right balance between competing national
security interests, an arrangement that may be negotiable at some future
time, if not now.
Our non-proliferation policy has been a chronic irritant to US–India
relations over the last thirty years. We should acknowledge the impor-
tance that India attaches to American willingness to change that policy
so that the United States can begin to sell it nuclear equipment, material
and technology. We should also admit that the proposed deal would
grant what New Delhi values most, namely our acceptance of India as a
nuclear weapons state. And while we are at it, we should admit that
although the deal would be critically important to our goal of improv-
ing relations with India, it will really do nothing to help us deal with the
risks posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Assertions to the
contrary are less than forthright.
There is no reason why we should attach any positive value to India’s
willingness to submit a few additional nuclear facilities of its choosing to
international safeguards, so long as other fissile material producing facil-
ities are free from safeguards. This move has been called “symbolic” by
critics, but it is not at all clear what useful purpose it symbolizes. The
other elements of the deal that are supposed to contribute to its non-pro-
liferation value were in place before the deal was struck. The first point
then, is that the Administration proposes this deal to address a genuine
regional security objective and not because it helps in any way our global
security concern over nuclear proliferation.

North Korea, Iran, and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons  29

 The second point is that the proposed arrangement will be too costly
to the national security to be justified by gain in relations with India.
Since the dawn of the nuclear age and the arrival of intercontinental
ballistic missiles, our nation has been defenseless against devastating
attack—leaving us to rely on deterrence, the promise of retaliation, to
deal with nuclear armed enemies. From the beginning, we recognized
that this left us vulnerable to anyone who could not be deterred, and so,
in some basic way, our security depended on limiting the number of
countries that ultimately acquired nuclear weapons. Most analysts
believe that fifty years of non-proliferation policy has something to do
with explaining why the spread of nuclear technology has not led to the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, why we live in a world of eight or nine
nuclear weapons states, rather then eighty or ninety. A key part of that
policy has been our support for an international norm captured in the
very nearly universally adhered to Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT). The norm is simple: in the interest of international security, no
more states should acquire nuclear weapons. There are many provisions
in the treaty and details to be understood to fully appreciate the norm,
but that is its essence. Certainly the fact that we have eight or nine states
with nuclear weapons rather than only the original five, means that the
norm has not held perfectly well. But it has had substantial force in the
face of widespread acquisition of critical nuclear technologies, and that
has been of vital importance to America’s security. Simply put, the
Administration now proposes to destroy that norm.
Some claim the deal would only recognize the reality of India’s
nuclear weapons program. But that is not accurate. Recognizing that
India and a few additional countries have acquired nuclear weapons
over the last three decades is not the issue. The damage will be done to
the non-proliferation norm by legitimatizing India’s condition, by
exempting it from a policy that has held for decades. And we would do
this, we assert less than honestly, because of its exceptionally good
behavior. In truth, we would reward India with nuclear cooperation
because we now place such a high value on improved relations with New
Delhi, not because of its uniquely good behavior.
Critics ask, if we do this deal, how will we explain, defend, and pro-
mote our policy of stopping Iran’s proposed uranium enrichment pro-
gram? Iran is, after all, a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
and as far as we know, has no fissile material outside of international

30  robert l. gallucci
safeguards and has never detonated a nuclear explosive device. A good
question, but not the best one because India has arguably been a more
responsible member of the international community than Iran. Rather, if
we do this deal, ask how we will avoid offering a similar one to Brazil
or Argentina if they decide on nuclear weapons acquisition, or our treaty
ally South Korea. Dozens of countries around the world have exhibited
good behavior in nuclear matters, and have the capability to produce
nuclear weapons, but choose not to, at least in part, because of the inter-
national norm against nuclear weapons acquisition, reinforced by a pol-
icy we would now propose to abandon. If we do this, we will put at risk
a world of very few nuclear weapons states, and open the door to the
true proliferation of nuclear weapons in the years ahead.
Finally, if there are two national security objectives in conflict here,
one regional and the other global, is it possible to reconcile them? The
answer is probably yes, but not now, not in the current context. Clearly
and regrettably, if the Administration’s proposal does not succeed, in
much the same form in which it has been put forth, US - India relations
will deteriorate for a time. But acknowledging that does not mean that
we should go ahead with a deal that would do irreparable damage to our
long-term national security interests. Instead, we should put forth a pro-
posal that more nearly balances regional and global security interests,
recognizing that it will be some time, at best, before it will appeal to
New Delhi.
The proposal would permit nuclear cooperation with India, if it
accepts a reasonably verifiable ban on the production of any more fissile
material for nuclear weapons purposes. This approach would permit
India reprocessing and enrichment facilities, but effectively require inter-
national safeguards on all its nuclear facilities and any nuclear material
produced in the future. Its appeal in regional terms is that it would allow
India to pursue nuclear energy without restrictions of any kind—more
than we are willing to do for Iran at the moment. From the global secu-
rity perspective, we will have succeeded in capping a nuclear weapons
program, a substantive achievement which arguably offsets a breach of
the long-standing policy against nuclear cooperation with a state such as
India that does not accept full-scope safeguards. The deal would have to
have other provisions, such as rigorous nuclear export control policies,
a ban on export of enrichment or reprocessing technology, and a perma-
nent prohibition on nuclear explosive testing, but this is its essence.

North Korea, Iran, and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons  31

 The deal described above would require India to choose between the
opportunity to expand its nuclear energy program on the one hand, and
the expansion of its nuclear weapons arsenal on the other. The Admin-
istration proposes to allow India to do both, and that would be a mis-
take. Our security depends on maintaining the norm against nuclear
weapons proliferation.

Robert L. Gallucci is Dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service

at Georgetown University.

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